Turbine engines are used as the primary power source for many types of aircraft. The engines are also auxiliary power sources that drive air compressors, hydraulic pumps, and industrial gas turbine (IGT) power generation. Further, the power from turbine engines is used for stationary power supplies such as backup electrical generators for hospitals and the like.
Most turbine engines generally follow the same basic power generation procedure. Compressed air generated by axial and/or radial compressors is mixed with fuel and burned, and the expanding hot combustion gases are directed against stationary turbine vanes in the engine. The vanes turn the high velocity gas flow partially sideways to impinge on a plurality of turbine blades mounted on a rotatable turbine disk. The force of the impinging gas causes the turbine disk to spin at high speed. Jet propulsion engines use the power created by the rotating turbine disk to draw more air into the engine, and the high velocity combustion gas is passed out of the gas turbine aft end to create forward thrust. Other engines use this power to turn one or more propellers, fans, electrical generators, or other devices.
In aircraft applications, a first turbine engine is typically mounted on the right hand side of the fuselage and a second turbine engine is typically mounted on the left hand side of the fuselage. The gas turbine engines on many aircraft are housed within an engine case, or nacelle. Typically, the engine nacelle includes one or more cowl doors that provide maintenance personnel with an access to the interior of the nacelle to repair and maintain the engine. Historically, aircraft with fuselage mounted turbine gas engines include at a minimum, four separate and distinctly different engine cowl doors per aircraft: a set of two on the engine located on the left hand side of the fuselage and a set of two on the engine located on the right hand side of the fuselage. Each set of engine cowl doors are fabricated to include an upper door and a lower door. More particularly, an aircraft having two fuselage mounted gas turbine engines would include: (i) one left hand side, upper engine cowl door; (ii) one left hand side, lower engine cowl door; (iii) one right hand side, upper engine cowl door; and (iv) one right hand side, lower engine cowl door. Due to the complexity of the plurality of engine cowl doors, each door is costly to design, tool, fabricate, inspect and test, thus driving up the overall non-recurring and recurring cost to manufacture the nacelle for each turbine engine. Four different engine cowl doors mean four different tools and processes, resulting in higher fabricating costs. For example, four bonding tools for composite doors or four forming tools for metal doors, and four assembly tools for metal and composite doors.
It should thus be appreciated from the above that it would be desirable to provide a fuselage mounted gas turbine engine including a plurality of non-handed engine cowl doors to minimize the number of engine cowl door designs required per aircraft. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.